Monday, July 30, 2012

Your piece over the weekend is laughable at best, Jim. You had the ability to advocate for two minority voices to be added to City Council this past year with Andy Rau and myself and wrote us both off. So much for your commitment to "diversity." You complain about anything having to do with the Republicans at the county level but have no problem with continuing the mentality of managing problems in the city with a lack of a plan to solve them. You and your fellow suburban-resident editorialists are part of the city's problem.

One example: Maggie Brooks worked how many years to replace the blighted corner on Main St with Renaissance Square and the Democrats burned it down in City Hall. How many more years will that corner sit looking the way it does today?

The D&C Editorial Page is a huge part of the problem with what goes on in the city, as a consistent enabler of dysfunction. And the funniest part of it is that other than Max, no Democrat and Chronicle editorialist lives in the city. You drive in, spout some garbage, and rush back out to the Republican run 'burbs. If the Republicans are so bad, why don't you move to the city where the Dems control everything completely?

You exercise influence without responsibility, at least until the day in the forseeable future when you stop publishing. You are accountable only to a corporate management and Board of Directors located in Virginia. The majority in the County Legislature, and the members of City Council, whatever we think of their performance, are accountable to the actual residents of this community.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Friday, July 27, 2012

This morning I read Rachel Barnhart's report about the Onandaga County Executive's effort to rein in suburban sprawl, by encouraging new developments in places with existing infrastructure. In large measure this means cities and towns.

I've always been on-board with that idea. Give me a quality urban environment any day over a sterile subdivision, however grand the McMansions. In the city you use your car a lot less. And it depresses me to see another field or farm bulldozed into a housing tract.

But I know that many people, and judging from the way suburbs have spread since World War II, probably most, don't share my view or at least don't think it's practical.

It raises the issue of cause and effect. Sprawl wasn't imposed by someone while the rest of us weren't looking. It's happened because most people want it. To slow it down, there has to be a demand for housing in the cities. And there is, some. But not enough to do what the Onandaga Exec. wants to do.

This afternoon, I came across this observation by P.J. O'Rourke, courtesy of Instapundit, addressing directly cause-and-effect in connection with sprawl:

Cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Even editorialists at the Democrat and Chronicle, who on Second Amendment issues typically don't know their assault rifle from their elbow, acknowledge in today's paper that "New York, after all, has some of the most severe gun laws in the nation and its streets are hardly the safest." Of course they don't even consider the possibility of cause-and-effect.

To remedy the deficiency, we commend to your attention these observations by writers with a closer understanding of human nature:

Thursday, July 19, 2012

I took a few days to think about how I wanted to explain my feelings about the President's comments from this past weekend. He essentially told all small business owners that they wouldn't be able to do what they do had it not been for Government investment and they should give more.

At first I was completely insulted and angry being a small business owner myself. But after thinking about it for a few days I have come to the realization that Obama just doesn't get it. He has never run a company, never created a company and has never held a private sector job. While he is out trying to paint Romney as the "out of touch with the middle class candidate" he fails to see that he is the one that is out of touch.

I would like to suggest a different take on this for him. Government is not able to do what it does without the job creators. Where does he think all of the tax revenues come from that allows Government to spend? The economy isn't creating enough jobs to even keep up with the normal population increases and new folks entering the job market, let alone re-employ all of those who have lost jobs over the past four years and now and he is talking about asking more from the folks that he demonizes.